


The Wrong Choice

by Melime



Category: Eye for an Eye (1996)
Genre: Community: femslashficlets, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 12:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10853724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime
Summary: It all came down to choices.





	The Wrong Choice

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [A Escolha Errada](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10853727) by [Melime GreenLeaf (Melime)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime%20GreenLeaf)



> Written for the [femslashficlets](http://femslashficlets.dreamwidth.org/) community, challenge #061 - choice.

It all came down to choices. People in horrible situations had to make difficult choices, it was something she saw everyday in her line of work, especially when she was working undercover. Of course, whatever were the circumstances, they didn’t excuse the people that made the wrong choice, but they did make it easier to understand those people’s mistakes.

She had choices to make too, every step of the way. It was one of the hardest things about being undercover. The difficult lines she had to navigate, of how much to interfere. No interference was impossible, simply by being there she was already disrupting the group, so she had to chose how far that disruption would go.

Some agents, when they go undercover, try to push people into action without actually doing that. Stimulating them just enough so it wouldn’t be thrown out in court, toying with the legal boundaries of entrapment just so they could close their cases faster, consequences be damned. She wasn’t like that, it didn’t seem right to be rooting for someone to be murdered just so she could move one case to the closed pile. But she normally wouldn’t have tried to stop people from acting either. Doing so would break her cover more often than not, and would just mean that people wouldn’t trust her.

It was a difficult balance. Inaction was impossible by design, and the wrong choice between stimulating and disencouraging action could have dire consequences.

She shouldn’t have told Karen anything, she was risking the whole operation just to keep Karen from throwing her life away. Angel wasn’t sure why she had done that, maybe because unlike so many parents, Karen still had a living child, younger than Sean, that needed her, maybe because she saw how unjust the whole situation was, how that prosecutor’s incompetence lead to a rapist and a murderer to walk free to do that again.

She wasn’t counting on Karen just showing up to her house and seeing Sean. Angel had honestly hoped that her words would be taken as the desperate advice of a friend and that her cover would remain intact, but it had been a bad gamble. Telling Karen the truth had the potential to be even worse, but Angel couldn’t just let her go back to the group without an explanation, that was sure to ruin the operation and possibly end her chances at another undercover opportunity any time soon.

Involving Michelle in it had also been a mistake, it would be so much easier to pretend she was divorced, the death of a child is a common enough justification to end a marriage, but Karen got her by surprise, and her training taught her that, when in doubt, the best solution is to give the closest thing possible to the reality. Contradictions and hesitation are what get you when you have a cover to maintain, so keeping things close to the truth helped with those.

However, it would be pointless to go over everything that she thought she did wrong, because it wouldn’t change the outcome. Her contact in Santa Monica PD told her what had happened as soon as they got the call. Over the course of the weeks she managed to get the names of all the killers - convicted or alleged - from the parents at the group, and she had an eye out for anything that might happen to any one of them. She even asked her contact to pay extra attention to Doob, just in case.

Angel shouldn’t review the evidence, just warn her supervisor that she thought Karen was one of the people supplied by the group to enact vigilante justice on her daughter’s killer. But the police was looking at it like self-defense, and Doob was found at her house, so Angel couldn’t help a little bit of curiosity.

Everything looked just fine, Karen had a perfectly reasonable explanation for shooting him, and yet, when Angel talked to the detective in charge, she knew that he knew, even though he never said anything.

Later, Michelle would ask her about it. She was a smart woman, Angel always loved that about her, and the dots weren’t too hard to connect. Michelle would know that Karen had planned everything and would want to know what her wife would do about it.

This case had already lasted so long, and Karen’s confession could put an end to this vigilante group before the next kill. But she would never talk, Angel was sure of this, and they wouldn’t be able to prove any of this in court. There’s a big difference between having a gut feeling and having hard evidence to back it up, if that weren’t the case, Karen wouldn’t even have been in that situation.

The only time they could talk, really talk, was when Sean was already asleep, and they were about to go to bed. Another problem with being undercover, the hours suck. She would like nothing more than to dismantle the whole group and close the case, but this wasn’t the break she was looking for, and besides, perhaps they would find some evidence on that drive-by shooting and that would be it.

It all came down to choices. And Karen made the wrong one, but was smart enough to protect herself. Perhaps seeing a killer get away with it twice for lack of evidence had inspired her. It was wrong, and Angel would never advocate for vigilante justice, but if the police was satisfied with it, and she had no evidence, what else could she do but accept it?

So, when Michelle asked her, when the lights were off and she was already half asleep, if she would flag Karen for her supervisor, she said no. It all came down to her choices as well. And she chose not to obsess over cases that couldn’t be proven, for her own sake.

At least if she was sure no more harm would come of it.


End file.
